Help Scout

Help Scout is a customer support platform that puts shared email, live chat, messaging, knowledge bases, reporting, and AI in one workspace. Teams can manage customer conversations in shared Inboxes, publish searchable Docs sites, embed Beacon support hubs, automate routing and replies, and connect customer context from other systems. Its current plans include a Free tier plus paid Standard, Plus, and Pro plans.

✨ Key Features

• Shared Inboxes — Manage team email and customer conversations in a shared workspace with assignments, views, tags, saved replies, snooze, and send-later controls.
• Multichannel support — Bring live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and email into the support workflow; phone can be connected through an integration.
• Beacon support hub — Embed contact forms, live chat, help articles, and proactive messaging in a website or product.
• Docs knowledge base — Build branded, searchable help centers with articles, collections, contact forms, and optional restricted access.
• AI Assist — Fix grammar, change length or tone, and translate selected text in replies, notes, Docs, and Messages where the plan supports it.
• AI Drafts and summaries — Generate draft replies from previous conversations and Docs content, and summarize long conversation threads for review.
• AI Answers — Configure an AI customer-facing assistant with knowledge and additional sources; billing is based on eligible resolutions rather than seats alone.
• Workflows and routing — Automatically organize, assign, or reply to conversations and distribute work with round-robin or load-balanced routing.

💳 Pricing

• Free — $0 — Includes up to five users, one Inbox, one Docs site, 100 contacts/month, ten saved replies, ten tags, ten articles, one integration and thirty-day reporting history. Paid AI Inbox assistance and usage-priced AI Answers are separate from these basic free tools. The Free plan is intended for teams that need the basics and does not require a payment method.
• Standard — $25/user/month — The official monthly pricing page lists Standard at $25 per user/month. It adds multiple Inboxes, live chat and SMS, social channels, multiple knowledge bases, basic workflows, and an AI Inbox assistant.
• Plus — $45/user/month — Plus adds advanced workflows, advanced SLA policies, a secure customer portal, unlimited AI Drafts, round-robin routing, and Salesforce, Jira, and HubSpot integrations.
• Pro — $75/user/month — Pro has a minimum of ten paid users: at the displayed monthly US$75/user rate, the base commitment is at least US$750/month before extras. Pro adds unlimited workflows and SLA policies, multiple routing types, SSO/SAML, HIPAA compliance, more light users, and dedicated onboarding/account support; the official page directs buyers to a demo.
• AI Answers — $0.75/resolution add-on — AI Answers is a separate usage-based add-on. The official pricing page lists $0.75 per resolution, with a three-month free trial and a monthly spending cap option.
• Free trial — 15 days — A Standard or Plus trial provides 15 days to test the plan without a credit card; Pro trials require contacting sales. Annual billing can reduce the displayed per-user monthly rate, so confirm the annual total at checkout.

Help Scout bills user-based plans per support user; some accounts may use contact-based billing. Add-ons and localized checkout totals can vary, so confirm the final amount and limits before purchase.

⚖️ Alternatives Compared

🎯 Use Cases

• Launching a self-service help center — Publish Docs articles and surface relevant answers through Beacon before a customer contacts an agent.
• Adding website chat — Embed Beacon live chat, contact forms, help articles, and proactive Messages in a product or marketing site.
• Managing multiple channels — Bring supported social, messaging, SMS, and email conversations into a common workflow.
• Automating triage — Use tags, custom fields, workflows, SLAs, and routing rules to prioritize and distribute incoming work.
• Drafting and reviewing replies — Use AI Assist, AI Drafts, and summaries to speed up writing while keeping a human review step.
• Scaling self-service with AI — Configure AI Answers against approved knowledge sources and monitor resolution-based usage and spending caps.